Here in the middle of exams week, I find myself with more free time to read. This morning, I read the end of Helen Schulman’s novel This Beautiful Life, a heartbreaking story of that fragility that defines even families that appear stable. Set in 2003, telling the tale of a high school boy who makes a bad choice by forwarding an inappropriate video of a classmate, the timeliness of her story could not be truer. Just yesterday, a man named Dharun Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail for spying on his gay roommate with a webcam at Rutgers in 2010. I didn’t follow the story closely the whole way through, so there are certainly intricacies to the case that I don’t understand.
His jail sentence will be over in a month, but his record will stay with him forever. Even if he hadn’t been convicted, he’ll always be “that guy that used the webcam to spy on his roommate.” In the story, Jake, the afflicted adolescent, is remorseful to the point where he resorts to painkillers to get some respite. Dharun allegedly has not ever offered an apology to the court or the family of his victim. While the intent of their offenses (Jake’s fictional and Dharun’s actual) differs greatly, it makes me think hard about everything that happens on my computer. Should I even be putting these thoughts out in public?
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